Help needed in Book Reading Order

Thanks, Your blog just re-affirmed the collective wisdom of VP… Plus little book reviews… Way to go… :smile_cat:

I took some time and have identified some books, courses, magazine, newspapers that can help you in learning more about investing. I have categorized them so that you can pick and choose. Of all the books I have read over the years, these are the ones I have found useful and have read most of them more than once.

The list is big. But do not get overwhelmed by it. Remember, this is not school homework you need to finish in a timebound manner. Go through them slowly but methodically.

I have found that reading every day for a fixed period, say 30 mins, at a fixed time, makes it easier to form and stick to the reading habit. Also, importantly, do not feel compelled to complete a book . If you do not like a book or feel it is not adding much value to you, feel free to skim through or put it down all together and move on to the next one.

Lastly, this is by no means a comprehensive list and I may have missed some very good books. If you think there are any that I have missed, please let me know.

So, here goes the list.

Building the Base

  1. Rich Dad, Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki

  2. One Up On Wall Street – Peter Lynch

  3. The Most Important Thing Illuminated – Howard Marks

  4. Margin of Safety – Seth Klarman (only pdf available; google for pdf; book out of print)

  5. The Warren Buffett Way - Robert Hagstrom

  6. Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Taleb

Fundamental Analysis

  1. Beating the Street – Peter Lynch

  2. The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing - Pat Dorsey

  3. Capital Returns – Edward Chancellor

  4. Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation - David Dreman

  5. How To Lie With Statistics – Darrell Huff

  6. The Financial Numbers Game Detecting Creative Accounting Practices – Charles Mulford, Eugene Comiskey

  7. The Art of Execution – Lee Freeman-Shor

  8. The Manual of Ideas – John Mihaljevic

  9. The Investment Checklist - Micheal Shearn

  10. Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits – Philip Fisher

Valuation

  1. Aswath Damodaran course on valuation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znmQ7oMiQrM&list=PLUkh9m2BorqnKWu0g5ZUps_CbQ-JGtbI9

  2. Financial Statement Analysis and Reporting from IIT Roorkee - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw4SlTWA7bpiUK-b6FssPlg

  3. Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation - Stephen Penman

  4. Investment Valuation - Aswath Damodaran.

Technical & Quantitative Analysis

  1. What Works on Wall Street – James O’Shaughnessy

  2. Quantitative Value – Wesley Gray, Tobias Carlisle

  3. Quantitative Momentum – Wesley Gray, Jack Vogel

  4. Dual Momentum Investing – GaryAntonacci

  5. The New Trading for a Living - Alexander Elder

  6. How to Make Money in Stocks – William O’Neill

  7. Technical Analysis of The Financial Markets – John Murphy

  8. Come Into My Trading Room - Alexander Elder

  9. Mechanical Trading Systems – Richard Weissman

  10. Trade Like A Stock Market Wizard – Mark Minervini

  11. Trend Following – Michael Covel

Investing Psychology

  1. Poor Charlie’s Almanac – Peter Kaufman

  2. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk – Peter Bernstein

  3. Influence by Robert Cialdini

  4. Drunkard’s Walk – Leonard Mlodinow

  5. Little Book of Behavioral Investing - James Montier

  6. Psychology of Intelligence Analysis – Richards Heuer

  7. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition – Michael Mauboussin

  8. More Than You Know – Michael Mauboussin

  9. The Disciplined Trader - Mark Douglas

Other Reading

  1. Seeking Wisdom - Peter Bevelin

  2. Tap Dancing to Work – Carol Loomis

  3. The Market Wizards (all the books in the series)- Jack Schwager

  4. Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator – Edwin Lefevre

  5. The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson

  6. Zurich Axioms - Max Gunther

  7. The Snowball – Alice Shroeder

  8. When Genius Failed – Roger Lowenstein

  9. Deep Work – Cal Newport

  10. The Personal MBA – Josh Kaufman

Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs

  1. https://www.fs.blog/blog/

  2. http://www.collaborativefund.com/

  3. https://fundooprofessor.wordpress.com/

  4. http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/

  5. http://hbr.org/

  6. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/

  7. https://www.brainpickings.org/

  8. http://investorfieldguide.com/

  9. www.thinkmentalmodels.com

  10. http://www.tweedy.com/research/papers_speeches.php

  11. https://www.project-syndicate.org/

  12. http://qz.com/

  13. https://www.nytimes.com

  14. https://www.bloomberg.com/

  15. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/business

  16. Forbes India

  17. Outlook Business

  18. Business Today

  19. Business Standard

  20. Mint

  21. Economic Times

  22. The Economist

  23. http://www.investopedia.com/university/all/basics/

  24. https://zerodha.com/varsity/

As Munger always says, investing is simple, not easy! Hope this helps.

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Thats a very comprehensive list of resources, Thanks for sharing.

Thanks, excellent list.

One book I have found extremely useful but never appears in any recommendation list is Michael Porter’s “Competitive Strategy – Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors”.

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Porter is a good book, but beyond the basic 5 forces model the book is fairly repetitive and slightly boring :smiley:

You can get a flavour of it from the personal MBA and the other online resources. Also, I prefer, usually to read from practitioners and not professors.

Apart from the excellent list by @basumallick dada (have added many to my wishlist from above ) , just a few more
Financial Shenanigans Howard Schilt ( This one and the next are highly recommended by Michael Mauboussin )
Creative cash flow reporting by Charles Mulford
Of long term value and investing by Bharat Shah
Michael Mauboussin article on moat
All i want to know by Peter Bevelin
Sherlock holmes by Peter Bevelin
Thoughtful investor by Basant Maheshwari

Great suggestion this . I have wasted lot of time completing the book for the sake of it .

@basumallick dada ,if one gets time to read only one business newspaper and one international magazine, which ones would you recommend ?

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Newspaper - This is my order of reading: 1) Business Standard 2) Mint 3) ET

Magazine - This is my order of reading: 1) Forbes India 2) Outlook Business 3) Fortune India 4) Business Today 5) Economist 6) Economic & Political Weekly

I have recently moved to reading more of long stories rather than the half paragraph ones.

Mint Long stories are really good and in general Business Standard also. ET has some very incisive reports but these days too much of political coverage (probably trying to cut cost by sharing political coverage team with TOI).

For serious investors who do not have a jio connection, I would suggest getting a subscription to Magzter Gold. They give a introductory offer for 999/- if you put your email id and then don’t register :slight_smile:

Those who have a jio sim, use the jionews app. You can use it on a tab or www.jionews.com on a desktop. Register for free while using a jio connection and you can get Business Standard, Mint, Hindustan Times, Forbes, Fortune, Business Today, Business World. For free :slight_smile: Enjoy while it lasts.

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Thanks for the comprehensive suggestions @basumallick dada.

This seems to be a great option . will try this out

Read in this sequence - 1,7,2,3. I have not read 6. You should probably skip reading 4 and 5 for now as they are a bit advanced and not necessary for someone like you who is a novice investor.

There is no Eureka moment in investing, it’s a complex learning exercise that needs to be continuously done. For instance you become a bhakt of value investing reading Buffett’s earlier letters but you will find him and other value investors doing very different things now. So the entire way of looking at things can change with time. My suggestion is that you figure out what works best for you now. And as depicted in the recent movie Frozen 2 - when the future is unclear, just do the next right thing. Things will unfold - all the best.

Also, pls understand reading is a continuous process in investing journey and reading one book multiple times is better than reading a lot of books single time. Each book has a central concept that you should understand, practice and internalize before moving to another book. Otherwise I have seen many people who read a lot but understand very little out it and remember even lesser.

Again stressing the point on quality of reading over quantity. I distinctly remember nothing was more true during the physics studies during my IIT JEE entrance exam days, there were people who did solve questions from every damn book from HC Verma to Irodov but failed at the exam miserably due to lack of understanding of concepts. And then there are people who just read the NCERT text book and cleared JEE with ease. So quality over quantity. Depth of understanding over breadth of reading.

Also, do remember creating alpha in investing is a lot about understanding few things deeply. The competitive advantage of a small investor or less known fund manager is his/her knowledge in few areas is far superior over most other plane jane investors who start their day from ET and end with Bloomberg. The latter know the reason why market moved by 0.25% that day or why Korean market went down by 0.25% that week but have very shallow understanding of the few things in the portfolio which matter a lot. Hence they are happy with diversification and generating just the market returns. But your aim through your reading (after all you are doing all this effort to create the alpha) is to know few things much better than most others. So don’t get into dogma of the regular way of reading newspapers, magazine and 100s of other stuff - read to create competitive advantage. I can go on and on but enough discourse for now.

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The Thoughtful Investor by Basant Maheshwari is a must read for any Indian Investor.
Practical book, easy read excellent book to refer again & again.

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+100
The thoughtful investor by Basant Maheshwari is one of sthe best books for Indian markets,along with Mr Bharat shah book: of long term value and wealth creation. A starter has to read these 2 books to get interest in Indian equity. That way he can relate better. Of course, Peter Lynch’s one up on Wall Street and Pat Dorsey’s- 5 rules for successful investing.These are must reads.
I think there is some inherent bias in people not taking Indian authors names when they list their favourite books, and thats why I don’t see the mention of these 2 books of Indian authors.

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I have no apparent inherent bias. Have read both and liked both. My issue is that both the books were written when the authors had much lesser experience in the markets. Investment philosophies and experiences change a lot over the years and I would much rather read something which is distilled advice from a long career spent in practising the trade than a few years.

It is the same reason why I do not have any of the early works of Ben Graham on my list or Mohnish Pabrai’s. They have all changed their thinking and self-corrected their ways. Why would I learn something that they themselves have rejected now?

For example, if I read blog posts I wrote 5 or 10 years back I cringe at what I see. Things have evolved so much over the years and I have learnt so much more by making more mistakes, do things right, being lucky, being unlucky that it seems like someone else had written those things.

So, no inherent bias. To be really honest, I have not found any great investing book to date. A few good ones are:

  1. Masterclass with Super Investors by Vishal Mittal & Saurabh Basrar
  2. Romancing the Balance Sheet by Anil Lamba
  3. The Thoughtful Investor by Basant Maheswari
  4. India’s Money Monarchs - compiled by Chetan Parikh (probably now available only as pdf)
  5. Of Long term value and wealth creation from equity investments by Bharat Shah (probably now available only as pdf)
  6. Value Investing and Behavioral Finance by Parag Parikh
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@basumallick dada, Economist magazine is very interesting to read . It has a free market bias . Is there any magazine that can provide a bias that’s different/opposite from this slant to have balanced views ? For eg right leaning newspapers can be balances by left leaning newspapers so that one stays neutral and is not overly influenced. Many thanks in advance

agree dada…
but I have a point to add

Bharat shah wrote this book in 2011-12 and by the time he had close to 22 years of experience in the market.I find his commentary and way to handle the market same as then.
Basant’s philosophy has changed a bit now it seems in terms of picking the large businesses over small ones. Rest all looks same- high growth companies, expensive stocks, concentrated portfolio and a great knack to know when to exit.
But valid point that they are less experienced compared to Peter Lynch or Buffetts of the world.Infact the very fact that Indian stock market is pretty young compared to US, makes the US authors more mature and experienced, they have seen lots of market cycles.

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Bharat Shah is one of India’s finest investors. And like all great investors, he too is always learning and refining his craft.

Below is a snippet where he has refined his judgement about a very critical aspect of investing - trends. (Thanks to my friend Anilkumar Tulsiram for this). This ability to update one’s opinions and thought process is not seen in very many people. Most people I have met have a dogged determination that what they know and have figured out is correct!!

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Good approach this one:

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Where we can get Bharat shah book?

It is out of print an only pdf is available. You can do a google search.

I have a pdf version downloaded from scribid

Agree completely @basumallick dada . This is what seems very critical in investing and goes a bit opposite to human instinct (hence less succesful investors compared to unsuccesful ones ) of confirmation bias and rejecting opposite evidence (behaviour which charlie munger so strongly advocates to guard against ) . I also many a times feel a pull to disregard evidence contrary to our expectations about my favorite stock .

John Maynard Keynes was the foremost to recognise this (that what is now call Bayesian updating ) when he said the below
“When the facts change , I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
I enjoyed reading the book "Thinking in bets " by Annie Duke which contains similar things discussed and much more .

So profound